Warrior Lessons: An Asian American Woman's Journey into Power - Couverture rigide

Eng, Phoebe

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 0671009575 ISBN 13 : 9780671009571

Editeur : Pocket Books, 1999

Synopsis

Book by Eng Phoebe

A propos du livre

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Lesson One: SHE CASTS OFF EXPECTATIONS

We know very well what it's like to live with family expectations breathing down our backs:

Get married! (and to the right man)

Have children! (meaning more than one)

Make money! (and lots of it)

Can't you be like ________? (Fill in the blank with the name of your nerd cousin, valedictorian friend, or other mother-appointed rival.)

When we don't live up to expectation, we don't need words to know. It's Asian mother telepathy. We can see it in their faces. The downcast eyes, the wistful, concerned look, the deep breath. No matter how much we try to ignore it, it still hits us hard. What do we do with the heavy burden of family honor? And do we ever escape it? Let's start with a story.

My mother and Rita were like sisters. They grew up together in Taiwan. They came to America together on a lark and found a way to stay here by enrolling in nursing school. They slept in the same bed in a cramped dorm room, head to foot, for a year. And Rita's feet stank like smelly cheese! my mother adds. They doubledated and ended up marrying two Chinese American guys who were also best friends. Their children grew up together. And when Mom and Rita hit forty-five, they shared their stories about disappointment and sometimes even depression.

After a while Rita's calls to my mother started to spin out of control. Rita would wail about whether it was worth living anymore until her gentle husband took the phone out of Rita's hard-clenched hand, apologized, and hung up. Rita said that her kids never did what she asked. She didn't know what had gone wrong. Her son was living with a hippie and smoked pot. Her daughter had two babies with her American boyfriend, didn't marry him, and left Rita to take care of her children. Rita told my mother that she had started to take Valium to calm down. And then her calls got wilder. She'd call my mother sounding drugged and crazy, again saying that her life had been worth nothing.

One spring about ten years ago, we got a call from Rita's husband, telling us that Rita had died. It seems that her nightgown had caught on fire while she was making tea, and despite her husband's desperate attempts to smother the flames that engulfed her body, Rita had burned to death. My mother and I often wonder if Rita killed herself, or was so drugged with Valium that she fell asleep on top of the stove. My mother ends the story sometimes by saying that Rita's tormented soul is really what killed her.

Rita's death showed me in a heart-wrenching way what can happen to a woman who is isolated and desperate and whose cries for help go unanswered. It showed me how our self-destructive sides can get the better of us, no matter how happy and carefree we might once have been. But for me, Rita's death carries even more of a punch. It has become for me a parable about disappointing one's Chinese parents. That is how deep expectations run. Don't live up to them and you run the risk of your parents going mad and dying of disappointment and shame.

Expectations: A key word in the Asian American coming-of-age lexicon that I have come to know so well. As the older of two daughters, I became the stand-in son that my parents never had. In those shoes, I received the windfall of their expectations and, to the detriment of my very deserving younger sister, the greater part of their attention. I also had to bear the crushing weight of their hopes. So what did I do with all that expectation? I did what any self-preserving person would do -- I tried as hard as I could to duck it.

At eighteen, I chose a college clear across the country and left my suburban New York home, ending up in the San Francisco Bay Area, home of the counterculture, hot tubs, and acid parties, the place where I pushed through some very important rites of passage and finally came of age. My choice to attend school three thousand miles away wouldn't be the first time that I would perplex my parents, and it certainly wouldn't be the last time I would disappoint them. When it became clear that I was not, in fact, going to Harvard (through no choice of my own, although filling out my application with a fat, blue Magic Marker pen probably didn't help my chances), I think they finally realized that they would have to begin to accept compromises in their American Dream daughter. So for the next twenty years, I have pushed the envelope of their willingness to compromise, pushed them to accept progressively more incomprehensible choices, like my decision to write these stories. That choice will mean having to deal with the fallout that will no doubt accompany the decision to write them as true stories, without the safety net that fiction can provide. Take it from this well-seasoned prodigal daughter: There is often nothing worse than not living up to parental expectation, and yet, when on a path to self-discovery, there is absolutely nothing better. That must be the tiger blood in me. Always stirring up trouble.

WHAT ARE YOU DOING WITH YOUR LIFE?

"Aiyo! Ah-Phee! Why do you write those bad things? People will think you are either stupid or crazy!"

That's Mom talking, the relentless voice of reason. She has just read the past few pages and is justifiably freaking out about her daughter airing dirty laundry.

"I want to connect with women that I care about; that's why I'm writing this book, Mom." I'm trying to explain a philosophy to her that I can already feel she won't understand. It's an American idea, this truth-telling process, probably grounded in some Christian notion of absolution. To my mom, truth is pretty useless unless it helps you get ahead. She believes in images, specifically, the image of her successful lawyer daughter, and that my salary and status should pave the way to a life free of problems. Certainly free from the necessity of writing what she surely views as a scathing tell-all, like something Roseanne would write.

"We have to have the courage to talk truthfully -- to admit that we have questions and that we're fallible. Saying so can be an act of power." I'm still not getting through to her. I give her a publisher's legal waiver and ask her to sign it.

"I am trying to create a special language of activism for people like you and me who need it, and to do that requires honesty."

"Let someone else connect and do activism," she says. "You worked too hard, you have such a good resume. You're throwing it all away! Oh, and by the way, if you're really going to write this book, I hope you're not going to write bad things about me, too. Are you?"

I begin to get a sinking feeling that we are in for one of our long discussions that pits me against her. It is the same dynamic that has kicked in every time I have reached a turning point in my life, where, instead of choosing the path of least resistance she lays out before me, I choose a dusty road of questionable adventure, strewn with rocks and potholes and thieves.

I have made a life out of defying Mom. She wanted me to go to a college close to home, so I found one as far away as I possibly could. She thought that I should go straight to law school after college, so I took a backpack and went around the world on five dollars a day for two years instead. When I hit twenty-five, she thought it was a good time to settle down with a nice Chinese boy. I decided to move in with a guy from southern Italy who chain-smoked. Now I was about to defy her one more time, by leaving the legal profession, the coveted prize for a mother's job well done, so that I could join a bunch of young writers with little in their bank accounts to publish a magazine for Asian Americans. I thought it was the opportunity of a lifetime. My parents thought I had gone off the deep end.

The struggle to meet the demands of fulfilling family expectations while still living lives of our own choosing causes a great deal of stress for many Asian American women and often creates situations where compromise is impossible. Yukiko, a Japanese student who has spent the last four years attending a rural college in Illinois, brims with energy and self-confidence. She shared this story with me over the Internet one day, exhibiting the ever-present guilt that comes along with choosing independence over family responsibility:

After I graduate from college, I probably have to go back home to be near my family next year. I know I don't have to go back, but I feel like I have to look after my grandmother and parents. I know they want me to be near them, but will I really be able to help them just because I'm near? I want to travel and experience other cultures around the world (and I haven't told them yet, but I already bought a ticket to Guatemala!). I feel guilty myself somehow. I really love my family. But if I have to stay close to home, I could not satisfy my life. So I will probably go my way even if my family doesn't accept it. THAT IS ME. I'll never ever regret my life. I wish to live with satisfaction.

The ache of striving to be oneself amid all the noise around us telling us to be something different can be wrenching. For many of us, one of our first opportunities to follow a self-defined path comes when we select our college majors. Our decisions to pursue our studies in art, literature, communications, or philosophy, may not necessarily generate the most positive feedback from family. As Phuong, a Vietnamese American community worker told me: "They don't understand what 'social work' is. My uncle says, 'What are you studying, and why does it take such a long time to study that subject?' The expectation of me is to be the emotional support of the family not the intellectual."

When I casually mentioned to my mother that I would be majoring in English literature, she took a deep breath and then threatened to pull the purse strings. "What's this English literature? You don't have to go all the way to Berkeley to read novels. You can do it closer to home. You study business or engineering or something useful, or you come home!" was her ultimatum. So I
studied business, took the least number of courses possible in that major, and loaded up on as many English classes as I could handle. Yes, I can have my cake and eat it too, I insisted. But it meant that I would have to work twice as hard as everyone else, doing what was expected while pursuing my own path, at the same time.

Expectation pressures follow us into the workplace, as increasing numbers of us choose career paths off the beaten track, as was the case for Carolyn, a poet from Hawaii: "My mom once asked me, 'Why you spend three thousand dollars on a computer for? You can't make money on poetry.'" Others, such as Prema, a lawyer-turned-funder, have explained their unpopular choices in terms that her family can respect and understand: "I told them I'm not a lawyer anymore. I do fund-raising. They said, 'Fund-raise? What's that? Is that a job?' So I told them, 'Okay, I do charity work,' which they understood. Luckily for me, charity work is seen as a very noble 'hobby' for a woman of status and wealth in India."

And when we start families, some of us are exasperated yet again that we are not living up to mother-standards, as was the case for Monique, whose mother is Chinese and whose father is Caucasian: "I thought my mother would be overjoyed at my pregnancy, even more so because I was expecting a baby boy. Instead she said to me, 'I'm a little disappointed. I wanted a girl.' Go figure. When my Chinese American friend told me she was pregnant recently, also with a boy, I told her not to expect her mom to be elated. She called me later and told me that her mom had the same reaction as my mom did. She couldn't believe it!"

In a 1987 study by psychologists Robert Hess, Chih-Mei Chang, and Teresa McDevitt, marked differences were found in the ways that Chinese American mothers accounted for their children's successes and failures as opposed to European American mothers. For instance, while the study found that European American mothers were more likely to attribute academic success to good school training, Chinese American mothers were more apt to credit good home upbringing. If Chinese American children fail, however, their mothers were more likely to attribute it to poor home upbringing than their European American counterparts. While success is not praised or outwardly acknowledged, failure is personalized and attached to family honor. It can create a feedback loop that conditions us to see success as a minimum standard.

Cheryl is Korean American, a publicist in the fashion industry. She tells a story about her childhood that many of us may remember well:

It seemed that I could never do enough. I always got A's in Catholic school, except for that one B I always got in religion. That B was all my parents ever focused on. I'd tell them, "But look at all the A's I got!" and they'd say, "Of course you got A's. That's what you're supposed to do." So the message was pretty clear. Instead of getting excited about my successes, I learned instead to fear not meeting their almost impossible expectations.

As my survey responses bear out, the pressure of expectations in our families comes almost solely from our mothers. For better or for worse, our mothers generally define our family spiritually and serve as the main communication link to their daughters, passing on to us their own ambitions. And while our fathers may cheer their children's accomplishments from a distance, the raw pressure to fight and perform is our mothers' turf.

Generally, our mothers are more willing to give us their blunt, if not imprecise, advice on how to lead our lives. Lora, one of San Francisco's most prolific labor attorneys, remembers working in a garment factory with her mother every summer since she was eleven. From dawn to dusk, they would sit behind sewing machines to earn the money the family needed to pay the rent and put food on the table. There were times when Lora would work during the school year as well. Working at that young age allowed her to understand the powerlessness of being used as cheap labor, as her mother would remind her constantly. At home, Lora again confronted her powerlessness as, night after night, she witnessed her father's gambling addiction. He'd raid her small savings and steal from her piggy banks when he had no money of his own. Lora remembers her mother's advice to her and her sisters when they were young:

My mother used to say, "Don't let yourself be treated like a girl-child slave. If you were in China, your father would have sold you a long time ago for money." She used to say that to us when we were seven, eight, nine years old. Basically, my association with being a girl and a child is with being a slave.

But how was Lora to figure out how to avoid this "girl-child slave" predicament? How was she supposed to fight for herself and be strong? Her mother had told them the situation to avoid. Yet as a young girl, Lora was faced with the problem without a clear way out. Lora, like many of us, was well aware of the goals that had been set out for her. What our mothers usually don't provide, however, are the step-by-step instructions on how exactly to get there or where exactly we should be going. Their expectations, though ominous, end up being imprecise, and daughters can wind up grasping at straws, understandably frustrated in trying to fulfill them.

When asked why we frequently forgo our own wants in order to fulfill our parents' expectations, many of us respond with reasons that incorporate notions of filial piety and reverence for our elders. I was taught at an early age the nature of that exchange. My parents worked hard to ensu...

Revue de presse

Margaret Cho Amazing and inspiring.

Naomi Wolf author of The Beauty Myth and Promiscuities At last, an exploration of growing up gifted, female, and Asian American that takes on every stereotype. Phoebe Eng's is a thoughtful, honest voice that is long overdue.

The New York Times Phoebe Eng has used the knowledge and credentials of her legal training to battle the stereotype of the super-feminine, subservient Asian woman.

Mary Pipher author of Reviving Ophelia I recommend this book to all those interested in women's efforts to find their true selves.

Pasadena Star-News (CA) Phoebe Eng lifts the silken veil of stereotype from the marginal world of Asian American women.

Helen Zia contributing editor, Ms. magazine An important book for all women, Warrior Lessons does more than remind us that to change the world, we must change ourselves; Warrior Lessons shows us how.

Harriet Lerner, Ph.D. author of The Dance of Anger With unflinching clarity and heart, Phoebe Eng offers validation, hope, and a path for authenticity, transformation, and action for Asian American women. Beyond that, she gives all readers a soaring sense of possibility as she gently provokes us to become truth-tellers and troublemakers in the most exemplary and honorable ways.

Eric Liu author of The Accidental Asian In a clear and true voice, Phoebe Eng sings of the power that flows from self-knowledge. The universal lessons of Warrior Lessons will awaken women and men alike; Asian Americans and all Americans.

Publishers Weekly Unique....In a natural, intelligent voice, Eng provides excellent advice while serving as a superb role model for younger Asian American women striving to come into their own.

Margaret Cho Exhilarating in its honesty, like those first acts of defiance against family and tradition. As Asian women, we need to thank Eng, master cartographer, for the map of our lives.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Pocket Books
• Date d'édition: 1999
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 0671009575
• ISBN 13: 9780671009571
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 365
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible